Mass Customization

Mass Customization

The term mass customization describes the trend of moving from mass production of standard catalog products to a production process where products are customized and made to order.

This is partly to meet customer demand for tailored products, but also to defend margins in the face of increasing competition from low-cost, mass-produced products.

The trend is most obvious in consumer products, where previously, economies of scale have left very little room for mass customization.

In the industrial equipment sector, variation in customer requirements has traditionally been greater than in consumer products. This has often resulted in products being engineered to order, albeit by reusing and modifying designs. The trend here is towards increasing standardization – core modules or assemblies are standardized, while the customers’ unique requirements are met via a virtually endless variety of configurations of these core components.

In both these areas, the product configuration task is a major challenge, due to the dependencies between choices that must be made to custom configure the product.